A podcast all about Japanese cartoons and comics as discussed by three self-proclaimed experts in the world of anime and manga! Plus anime news / reviews, coverage of classic anime, hentai / yaoi, and much, much more. Updated every week. We hope.

Anime World Order Show # 153 – You’re STUPID Tieria, so just SHUT UP, STUPID!

We were originally going to release this last week, on the 24th of March, on Daryl’s birthday, but alas he had to spend time with his FAMILY. So here it is a week later. Though technically it’s already like a year late, because this time we review Mobile Suit Gundam 00! Note: this isn’t edited. Like, at all in fact. Normally we edit for clarity and to remove cross-talk, excess noise, table banging, and the like. NOT THIS TIME.

There are no notes or proper timecodes just yet because uh, I’m about to head out of town all weekend, but um…rough estimates for now:

Introduction (0:00 – 22:00)
We talked about the contemporary standing of Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise. Or the lack thereof…

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12 Replies to “Anime World Order Show # 153 – You’re STUPID Tieria, so just SHUT UP, STUPID!”

Yes, I’d definitely enjoy listening to an AWO review of Wings of Rean.

I am not that negative towards the second season of Gundam 00 and the movie, personally speaking, but I can agree they were both inferior to the original series. I just can’t honestly go into great detail about my own perspective here.

First, I’d need to re-watch the show, which I haven’t done yet and am not in any hurry to do, in order to present a proper argument about which criticisms are fair and which of them seem at least exaggerated (you guys aren’t making stuff up, a bunch of your descriptions rang fairly true, yet I am pretty sure certain situations can be interpreted very differently, given some discrepancies between what you are saying and what I can still recall).

But second, and most of all, I can’t really see where Gerald is coming from. I honestly didn’t find Gundam 00 particularly confusing for a Gundam series. Something like G-Reco was often hard to keep track of due to Tomino’s awkward use of dialog and sudden cuts. This show? Not so much. I guess if Gerald typically doesn’t care for those other Gundam shows though, then that specific storytelling approach which many mecha fans tend to take for granted isn’t going to appeal to him.

As for Daryl’s views regarding how disappointing sequels can make something that came before retroactively bad (or just plain worse)…I’d like to ask him: how do you feel about the sequels to Votoms? Shining Heresy and the rest. .In the interest of full disclosure, I think most of the Votoms sequels are strictly unnecessary and pretty bad (except for Alone Again, maybe), but they don’t detract from my appreciation for the original TV series even if Takahashi should have left Chirico alone.

By the way, now that the most recent Gundam series is almost over, a good case could be made that Iron-Blooded Orphans actually has had a superior second season in some ways. Not at the start of S2, mind you, but things have arguably been improving lately. Without spoiling anything, I think they’ve already compensated for how the first season ended. Not with much in terms of subtlety, admittedly, but what do you want/expect from a Gundam show written by Mari Okada? In that sense, it works. Hope I am not speaking too soon, given this is all happening right before the finale though.

And yeah, I think more people should go back and watch or read Toward the Terra, though I imagine either version is no longer in print by this point. Even the old movie adaptation, which has its own weird charm despite not being nearly as good as the TV series, should still be available from Nozomi.

PS: Hey, there were hints for the wagon conspiracy! People (myself included, at least shortly after the fact) just dismissed them, but it wasn’t an unpopular or unreasonable idea.

I just want to say that despite the lack of editing in this episode, it wasn’t really noticeable for me personally and I don’t think the episode really suffered for it. I probably wouldn’t have known at all if there wasn’t a disclaimer right at the beginning. If it makes your life easier or allows you to release shows more on the regular I would have no problem if this continued.

So the way I understand this episode, its the same as Initial D from last year, but you just take out anyone saying “Initial D” and replace the name with “Gundam 00” and its the exact same rant episode.

I mean, we gotta get one of these a year so, im all down for it.

(Ok, yes I know it isn’t the same, but the rhetorical logos remains consistent).

I honestly thought when you described this person who paid you to review Gundam 00 as the same person that also requested you review Initial D, I thought for a moment that I got really drunk and paid you the money one night and never remembered it. But to my benefit, I realized this person loves both Initial D AND Gundam 00, and then I realized that it wasn’t me. Talk about a false alarm there.

While said Patron of the in-sidious dark AWO arts thoroughly enjoyed the thus far hours he’s listened to this episode; especially the TRUTH about Tieria’s exotically masculine voice (a trait none-other than Mr. Camui Gackt shares) and propensity to appear as a woman, in Bob cut and nerd-chick glasses no less!

And will probably crash his vehicle when he gets to the part where Gerald contradicts the entire episode for a mysterious illogical reason, in a style akin to Fast Karate’s olden episode stingers they’d insert at the very last second of the podcast.

Truth be told Roger, I like Initial D more than just the music, but the music makes up a good chuck of that love. The rest would be the arcade games (which I do happen to own Ver 1 in my garage) and anything else AWO hates that I enjoy about Initial D.

I was never too keen on racing games, not even Gran Turismo, aside from Konami’s masterpiece Enthusia… that was a very noteworthy title since they tried to 1-up Polyphony at their own game, and amassed a hoard of Initial D fans from that Dragon Range stage.

Consensus on the internet says Version 3 of Arcade Stage was the best, which strangely enough was the only one I ever played. That is, while I was a quarterless tween-ager running on free credits cause I knew the owner of the place.

Clarissa hit the nail on the head as to why I chipped-in for the review. Nerds just wanna have their ideas relayed back to them on a massive platform. Granted this isn’t the front page of New York Times or Otaku USA technically either but…

AWO was the 1st podcast I started listening to fresh into & out of college many moons ago. So even long forgotten AWO memes (Kojima’s definition of memes, not the internet’s) herald a special place in my memories from long forgotten episodes.

Remember that horrible Golgo 13 Photoshop talking about something Canadian banning anime back in AWO’s first year? That was the first of many uncanny-valley submissions I sent Daryl & the gang.

As to Gerald’s perplexion on if I took any enjoyment or disdain to AWO’s reviews of 2 of my favourite anime series, namely Initial D & Gundam 00… well, I think Daryl put it best in an old episode where he rebutted someone, Moot I think (?) in a very Zen-like Macias manner, when he mentioned: “It’s just Japanese Cartoons man, don’t take it too seriously…” or something to that effect.

So it was like watching your favourite movie star rip then complement whatever hobby you like. I’d be the happiest nerd in the world if Keanu, Fishburne, & Moss sat in a lounge and talked smack about a deadpan serious Japanese cartoon about racing; then raved about the geopolitical messages of a very political robot cartoon about terrorism… they relayed exactly what was on my mind.

Among the many reasons I’ve always liked AWO is its common sense, a quality not always associated with we otaku. As you point out, considering all the new anime there is to keep up with, people may simply not have the time to go back and watch something from 30 years ago. I can’t be too quick to point fingers—when I got into anime in the 1980s, it was the contemporary stuff I wanted to watch; I felt no particular desire at the time to try to track down (for example) the classic Toei anime films of the 1950s and 60s. And, of course, otaku have been famously described by Hiroki Azuma as “database animals”—if we desire to see an anime because we find out it has elements we like, it seems equally reasonable to decide not to watch something because we find out it has elements we don’t like.

In contrasting Royal Space Force with the works of Studio Ghibli, it’s perhaps worth noting that Hayao Miyazaki was a great admirer of the former film. In part as a consequence of her beliefs, Riqunni is a somewhat marginal and poor person within her society (the lead women characters of each of Miyazaki’s first three films were literally royalty who were heirs to an ancient power or prophecy). Riqunni is very unusual as a woman lead character in anime (or perhaps in film in general) in that her role is centered not in her “casting,” but in her ideas and beliefs, and it is these that motivate and confront the protagonist, and hence the events of the plot. Her motivations are not sugared by her design or her appearance, as is often the case with “strong woman characters.” Female anime characters are almost always cool, cute, or both; Riqunni is neither. Nor is she an action character, although when she has to use physical force to defend herself, she does so successfully and saves herself from further victimization.

It’s an greatly crass but bluntly honest metric by which to judge the success of Royal Space Force’s non-sexualization of Riqunni that there has hardly ever been any ero doujinshi or fan art of her, and considering she was designed by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, this can only be seen as a conscious decision of the film. The film doesn’t view the character sexually (Shiro does; the film doesn’t) but, unusually for an anime, neither does the film inspire the audience to view her sexually. As you know, the fact an anime itself lacks fan service or nudity doesn’t stop otaku from creating such if they find the characters cute or attractive, and there has certainly been plenty created for the Ghibli films. I feel Royal Space Force reinforces the point even further with its “little sister” character, Manna. This could have been where GAINAX made some concession to cuteness for the sake of audience affection, but Manna is even further from mainstream notions of a female anime character than is Riqunni, and this was certainly true the movie’s era as well (compare the two women to the designs of Kitazume, Hirano, Yasuhiko, Inomata, Takada, Sonoda, or Mikimoto).

I kind of agree with Gerald; for years, I’ve felt like Gundam fans seem to be getting incredible kicks from things I’ll never know. I enjoy some of the OVA series (particularly War in the Pocket), but for the most part, I just don’t get the appeal at all.